The Information Security Office at UTRGV will host the second annual Cyber Security Expo from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday in the Student Union on the Edinburg campus and Thursday in Salón Cassia on the Brownsville campus.
During the expo, attendees can expect to learn about several ways to be cybersecure in their daily and professional lives.
“[Not being cybersecure] would affect [students] on their personal and school life, because nowadays everything is done electronically,” UTRGV Security Analyst Francisco Tamez Cavazos said. “Anything that is online, it could be from visiting websites, shopping online, visiting your social media, or even checking your email account. Cybersecurity is how to be safe on all of those channels.”
Cavazos said the most common cybersecurity threat is phishing.
Phishing is a form of fraud in which the cybercriminal tries to learn information by tricking a user as a trustworthy entity or person via email, he said.
“These cybercriminals aim to persuade you into giving your personal information by replying or by clicking a malicious link in something that looks like a legitimate email, but in reality it is not,” Cavazos said.
The expo will have two webcasts where students will learn how to be cyber secure. The first webcast, “Top Attack Techniques, Top Human Risks and How to Create a Cyberware Culture,” is part of the National Cyber Security Awareness Month. The second, “Five Lessons Learned From Petya and Wannacry Ransomware,” are about waves of cyberattacks that hit computers and enterprise servers. They impacted more than 300,000 globally, according to The Indian Express newspaper.
“It is important for students to attend these type of expos in order to gain knowledge and experience and also connect with officers within the university, so they can learn what we are doing to help them, to protect them,” Tamez said. “We can just take the example of what happened with Equifax. The information that was breached included names, Social [Security] numbers and license numbers. Those are all tools to create identity frauds.”
He said it is important for students to be aware of these issues, because it can become something more dangerous.
“At the very least, people have to have the best practices of cybersecurity, which are having a clean machine with antivirus; being safe on social media; always keeping an eye out for those suspicious emails. So, as long as people are doing the basics, that’s good enough,” Tamez said.
At the expo, students will also learn about other departments.
“You will not only learn about us and what we do, but also other departments are going to be there, such as the Career Center, and they are going to be providing information to students about careers related to the security field,” he said.
The expos are free and open to the public.
For more information, email the Information Security Office at is@utrgv.edu.
